What would Dick Cheney do?

To be sure, virtually every political professional in D.C. believes that the Cheney approach would be madness for any president to embrace. Even top Republicans privately point to Bush’s low approval ratings in the second term as the consequence of Cheneyism.

“Utter rejection by 80 percent of the country would hurt most folks’ feelings,” said Democratic veteran Paul Begala. “Cheney’s style of defiance and arrogance ultimately got Scooter Libby convicted of a felony.”

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With the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, Ronald Reagan pioneered the conventional response to scandal that Obama is now employing. After trying to hunker down as the scandal increasingly threatened to bring down his presidency, he waived executive privilege and created the Tower Commission to look into what happened. He also brought in fresh blood to senior roles, including pulling NATO Ambassador David Abshire into the West Wing.

“If you’ve got a bum tooth, you’ve got to pull it,” said Abshire, who now leads the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and supports something modeled on the Tower Commission to look into what happened at the IRS.

Gergen—the elder statesman who managed the response to scandals in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations—said Obama is paying the price for not cultivating relationships the last five years.

“He cares deeply about his legacy and how he’s seen by history,” said Gergen, who teaches at Harvard. “He has much less concern about how he’s seen by the villagers of Washington, and that’s a mistake. You need people like that at moments like this. They can be very, very helpful to you.”

Gergen said that Vernon Jordan helped Clinton enormously and that even Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham gave cover for the Reagans on the dinner-party circuit.

“It’s hard for me to think of someone in town who is that figure in this instance,” he said of Obama. “And I don’t think they care very much about that. It’s just not part of their game plan.”

Gergen is a big advocate of aggressive and open response, especially when the president has not been directly implicated.

“Not only did he fire the IRS director but he did it with sense of anger that showed he had no fear of retaliation from the guy he fired,” he said. “If you’re president and you’re dismissing someone who has got something on you, then you handle it in a very different way.”

Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry said Obama will be smart if he stays focused on the issues regular people care about—even if the coverage continues to focus on the scandal. He said the media won’t cover the substance of Obama’s Friday speech on jobs in Baltimore, but he needs to relentlessly stay on message.

“We basically had the mantra,” McCurry recalled, “‘I know what you want to ask me about X, but I’m going back to my work for the American people.’”